Hello Forum,
I am not sure if this is a bug or a changed behavior as I could not find any discussions online regarding it, so I figured I should ask here.
When I select text in konsole it would usually select (assuming forward selection) from the character you click to the end of that line, then any entire lines between that and the final line to the last character). Currently on my system it will only show a selection if the above is true but also it is within the span of the line. So if you try to select in an empty terminal no selection shows as opposed to a selection of blank lines.
I would appreciate any help in clarifying if this is intended or not. If it is, I am curious if others would also like to see the old behavior as an option. The reason I like the old behavior is that it is a good way to get instant feedback whether a selection is attempted or not since there is no visual distinction between empty lines and lines populated with whitespace.
Best regards
Mikael Lövqvist
1 Like
Hi! I wanted to ask just in case, do you happen to have a screencast recording, or video example from elsewhere that you could point to, of the behavior that you’re looking for but not currently seeing?
I’m not sure I’ve personally seen the described behavior before, but that might just be from not remembering 
Hi, sorry, I have been a bit busy.
This screenshot shows two machines, archlinux and efforter. archlinux uses an older konsole (24.08.2) and shows that selections extend beyond the content of a line (top screenshot).
In the middle screenshot I have done the same mouse move (depress mouse button in top left, drag towards down right which is how the first selection was made). This will end up selecting nothing.
The third example is also the version mentioned in the original post but now with some content to select.
The behavior can look different if you have a lot of spaces written in the blank area, like if you run top and select there, because now it is not empty even if nothing is visible.
If I actually copy the first selection I get a sequence of 0x0a (newline). So in terms of function there is not much difference but I do often make selections like this to overwrite my clipboard and sometimes to see if a terminal is updating or just to see that konsole is responsive in general (which it tends to be).
Regards
Mikael Lövqvist
Interesting difference, thanks for the screenshots! I don’t see any obvious bug reports or code changes that would be both in-between 24.08.2 and 24.12.1, and that would clearly impact that behavior. There’s 413426 – Show highlight until end of line in selection including newline that at least sounds related, but that’s ~2 1/2 years ago)
I’ll have to defer to others with more knowledge of Konsole
